Carlos Sainz believes that his deficit to Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc in Austin was rooted in the latter’s ability to better cope with The Circuit of the America’s bumpy surface.
Sainz finished last Sunday’s US Grand Prix in fourth position, or two spots ahead of Leclerc, but the result – later aggravated by the Monegasque’s post-race exclusion – was skewed by his teammate’s botched one-stop strategy.
Over the course of the weekend, Leclerc was consistently faster than Sainz, qualifying on pole for Sunday’s race and preceding the Spaniard in Saturday’s sprint.
Sainz reckons that he was impacted more than Leclerc by COTA’s undulating and bumpy surface.
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“For me, it’s mainly track characteristics,” he said when asked about the pace difference between his teammate and himself.
“The car here is bouncing around a lot and jumping around a lot and when that’s the case normally Charles copes with it a bit better than I do.
“And this time I didn’t have time to change the setup to improve it, to put it a bit more to my liking, and go into the race weekend a bit more comfortable with the car to extract more and more performance.
©Ferrari
“In Sprint weekends that’s the problem, that you’re stuck with the baseline set up more or less that you can run and the amount of bumps again this year surprised us being even bumpier than last year.
“I’m just not coping very well with it in the high speed. Not a lot of confidence.
“I feel like the car is going to snap on me at any point in time, and I’m having to drive one step under the limit, which is never ideal in quali.”
Sainz also admitted that he needs to get his act back together in qualifying, an exercise that he dominated at Monza and in Singapore.
“I need to focus on getting my quali pace back and keep doing a good job in the race because the pace is definitely solid,” he said.
“I was pushing hard out there along with good tyre management.”
Looking ahead to this week’s Mexican Grand Prix, Sainz believes the smoother tarmac of the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez should serve him better.
He also hopped that Ferrari would be spared the engine reliability issues that it encountered last year in Mexico City’s rarefied environment.
“Smoother, no, Mexico? It’s just the kerbs, kerb riding sector one, sector two it’s a lot to get right,” he said.
“Hopefully we can put the Singapore setup on and be quick, and let’s see how the engine behaves this year.”
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